Transaction Analysis

Orioles Embrace Ubaldo's Upside

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Not long ago, on Effectively Wild, we were asked a hypothetical question about two pitchers. One produces A.J. Burnett’s average season, every time, with no fluctuation. The other is realistic: he produces good years, bad years, great years, lost years, average years. In an absolute sense, the pitchers are equal and have the same expected value, but would a GM tend to pay more for the volatile one or the certainty?

In 2014, PECOTA expects Ubaldo Jimenez to produce a 3.73 ERA in 171 innings, good for 2.1 WARP. It expects Matt Garza to produce a 3.66 ERA and 2.0 WARP in 164 innings. In other words, they’re practically identical in quality and in quantity, overall. They were born two months apart, they are both right-handed. Yet perhaps no pitcher in baseball portends more fluctuation than Jimenez, and no pitcher in baseball has been more consistent than Garza, about whom we recently wrote: “He has never had an ERA over 3.95; he has only once in those seven years dropped below 3.69.”

And so, we have our answer, right? Garza got four years and $50 million, and while under the intoxicating effects of a vacation reportedly turned down the Angels’ take-it-or-leave-it offer of four and $52. Ubaldo, cutting it close to the start of the season, has now signed for four years and $50 million. Given the value of the compensation draft pick the Orioles forfeited to sign him, they paid ever so slightly more for Jimenez than the Brewers and Angels offered for Garza, which fits—PECOTA favors Jimenez ever so slightly over Garza. The answer to the question: Fluctuation doesn’t matter.

And boy oh boy will Ubaldo fluctuate. This tweet is less than 11 months old:

Ubaldo's velo down so bad that Gameday has him throwing 15 changeups in the first inning. At least half were fastballs.

Here’s what I wrote in my notes from that game: “Very jerky. Bad balance. Way open. Slightly calmer in the stretch, but loses velocity. Not much movement on fastball. Missing up/down, not left/right. Differential between fastball/splitter makes it hard to say what many (84, 85) even were. Splitter is up and in the zone. (By third inning) has almost totally abandoned fastball. Command deteriorating, definitely worse than in the first. Occasionally loses balance completely.”

He finished April with baseball’s 13th-worst ERA and 21st-worst K:BB ratio. In the next five months, he allowed more than three earned runs in a game twice.

When I wrote this week about Homer Bailey’s apparently imminent extension, I argued that pitchers can recreate themselves so dramatically (with health, repertoire, mechanics, approach) that it’s hard to find the balance weighing what they are with what they’ve been. What makes Jimenez interesting is that his fluctuation is the most consistent thing about him. And even now that he seems to have figured something out, he has done so in a way that makes him inherently unreliable. Ben Lindbergh and Doug Thorburn noted late last year that Jimenez had made mechanical fixes that were producing more velocity,

but that the mechanical fixes were themselves complicated and challenging to repeat. His release point remains all over the place, a baseball-specific application of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle*. As Ben put it,

This is the Apollo 13 approach to pitching mechanics. An oxygen tank blew up, and the Service Module has to be abandoned? Okay, we’ll use the Lunar Module as a lifeboat. The square Service Module carbon dioxide scrubber cartridges don’t fit the round receptacle in the Lunar Module? Fine, we’ll build a makeshift scrubber out of tape, cardboard, and a plastic bag. It will work for a while, but not forever, and there’s still a hole in the side of the Service Module. Jimenez has found a way to compensate for his suspect mechanics. But because he hasn’t addressed his delivery’s deeper flaws, this might be more of a temporary fix than a lasting solution.

(There is, by the way, an emerging meme that says Ubaldo's good streak was confined to a dozen starts against poor opponents late in the season. Here's an example:

Last year, prior to his hot finish, Jimenez was 7-5 with a 4.49 ERA and 1.50 WHIP through 20 starts. So, essentially, what we're looking at with Jimenez is a pitcher who was ... great for 12 starts to finish the 2013 season.

The implication is that he continued to be bad all the way through those first 20. In fact, the damage was concentrated in three bad starts in April. In the final 16 of those 20, he had a 3.40 ERA and a K per inning. In the final 28, he had a 2.61 ERA. More accurately, we might say: "So, essentially, what we're looking at with Jimenez is a pitcher who was ... great for 28 starts, and otherworldly for 12 to finish the 2013 season." And, while those final 12 were against poor opponents, his opponents' TAv last year was equal to the median for pitchers with at least 100 innings. And the velocity chart doesn't care about his opponents. I bring it up only because, to accept Jimenez as an example of the often-great/often-terrible archetype, we have to believe he's been great. He has been great.)

In most any field, you can think about equivalents to Ubaldo. He’s the Lou Reed of baseball. He’s the Nicolas Cage of baseball. The Lyndon Johnson of baseball. High highs, low lows, and the uncontrolled ambitions that make the one possibility contribute unavoidably to the other. How we judge these fluctuators ultimately comes down to the stakes: Are the benefits of an above-average performance greater than the cost of his crater?

The cost of fluctuation, fittingly, fluctuates. For a competitive team that has no starting pitching depth, like the Giants or Angels last year, the stability might be best. Likewise for a team that has true aces who will fill the two-start spots in a playoff rotation. But consider the Orioles: They have about one 1 in 20 shot at making the playoffs. If they add Jimenez and he has one of his off years, well, there was already about a 95 percent chance that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They need a lot of things to go right, more right than we’re predicting. Adding Garza’s certain two wins doesn’t move the needle. Adding Jimenez and his possibility of six is a start.

For an underdog, there’s might be no better hope than gambling on upside. This is a gamble, and, as Jimenez showed in the final five months of last season, there is upside.

*Don’t know if this is right —Sam Miller

Fantasy

Ubaldo Jimenez

It figured that Jimenez would eventually sign, so the downgrade reflects the shift from Cleveland to Baltimore, not from free agency to having a big league home. The downgrade is slight, though. Not only did Jimenez establish himself once again as a high strikeout option, he posted the highest K/9 of his career. A move to Baltimore hurts all but the most extreme of ground ball pitchers, but for a right-hander the move out of Cleveland isn’t quite as radical as it would be out of another park. Jimenez maintains a high risk profile due to the walks, but an ERA between 3.50 and 3.75 with a lot of strikeouts is a reasonable expectation.

While he could still win a job in camp, it seems likely that Gausman is the odd man out now in the Orioles rotation. This isn’t the worst possible outcome for Gausman’s long-term development, but from a fantasy perspective it means that you might be looking at between 60-120 innings and not a full season. The probable demotion is only noteworthy in redraft leagues; in dynasty formats, this changes nothing about Gausman’s bright future. —Mike Gianella

Piggybacking on the theme of the article ... Ubaldo is a must late round or low dollar target .... if hes on - the park doesnt matter - see Rockies great seasons - you get a bargain... if hes off - hit the eject button of bench and watch. One other caveat - Jimenez has responded to strong Managers...Buck fits the bill.

As an Indians fan, I'm both sad to see him go and glad he's someone else's risk. The Orioles, with more payroll flexibility than the Indians, can afford to gamble on a 4-year chance that he really has figured it out and can maintain whatever delivery he found in the 2nd half last year.

As an Orioles fan, I thought this was a good move for the team. As the article points out, if he is bad, we (sorry KG, R.I.P.)are no worse off than before. It's not as though Jimenez is pushing some pitching machine down to the minors because of his contract. In fact, his upside give the team a distinct chance to be better than they were, and it relieves pressure on the Orioles' young pitching prospects to come up and produce at the major league level before they are ready. If the upside gamble pays off, he could be a great complement to Bundy and Gausman when they do arrive at Camden Yards for the long term.

In this study, which does replicate real-life conditions better than the others, the incremental value of the Pappas/Sutton type-pitcher is 180 pennants in 10,000 years; the incremental value of the Drysdale/Carlton type is 203 pennants. The advantage decreases, but it doesn't go away.

So it is very clearly true, based on these studies, that big years mean something. The historic bias in favor of pitchers who have big seasons appears to be justified — and Pappas' argument that he should be treated equally with Drysdale, because his record is almost the same, should be rejected.